Later, I’ll describe some better options that allow you to adjust to the needs of your customers — options that’ll take less time and energy and help more people.

Physical products

You might think your idea to start selling steampunk cosplay outfits on Etsy is amazing — but the truth is, the profit margins are incredibly low.

For example, we have a notepad that our designers created internally for the IWT staff. We debated selling it to our readers — UNTIL we found out that we would have to price the notebook at around $50 just to break even.

And after we shipped it to people, our profit margins would have disappeared completely — all for a tiny notepad.

I know there’s some money to be made with physical products — but the profits are much better with online products.

Advertising

We’ve all seen (and been horribly annoyed by) this business model before — typically in the form of little advertisements a la Google Adsense on the sidebars of websites.

And they DO make money…kind of.

As you get traffic to your site, some people will click on the ads and when they do, you get a few cents — or maybe even a few dollars.

BUT they don’t really make that much money.

I tried this for IWT before — but quickly realized that I needed a HUGE amount of visitors (somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million) per month in order to make good income on ads.

That’s a lot of traffic and a good way to fall prey to churning out pointless clickbait. No thanks.

Affiliate marketing

I used to dabble a lot in affiliate marketing back in the early days of IWT. The way it works is a blogger will write a review of something like “My favorite credit cards” and at the bottom they’ll say, “You can sign up for the card here — NOTE: this is an affiliate link.”

So if you click that link and sign up, the credit card company pays the blogger an affiliate commission ranging somewhere from $50 to $75.

There are affiliate programs for anything too — books, weight loss products, what have you.

And it’s great — at first.

When I used affiliates, I only promoted products that I used myself and knew that my readers would value and enjoy.

As soon as I put in an affiliate link on my site, I became ING Direct’s number one affiliate in the world — overnight.

I was making more than $10,000 a month just by putting a link on my site!

However, I soon learned that it wasn’t a great long-term plan. My click-through rates tailed off and I ended up having to spend all this time dealing with advertisers.

Coaching vs Online Courses: Which is the best for you?

Spoiler: Both business models are great — but the best one becomes clear once you weigh the benefits of each.

I love coaching. I actually believe it’s one of the best ways you can learn business skills. In fact, you’ll pick up skills you’d never learn with any MBA through coaching.

Some other benefits:

It’s a fast way to get started with your online business

You can charge premium prices for the work

You’ll learn your clients’ deep fears, desires, and barriers — incredibly valuable nuggets of information you can use to grow your business

Coaching also has its limitations though — you can only take on a limited number of clients, constraints of travel as well as time to meet with clients, etc. — which is why I prefer online courses.

I’ve taught thousands of people how to start new businesses, become freelancers/consultants/coaches, scale their existing business, and adopt psychology mindsets on how to live a Rich Life through my courses.

This is my favorite business model by far. Online courses are low-risk, high-reward, and they scale incredibly well. All it takes is for you to sell an information product like a video or written course.

Some other benefits of online courses:

You’ll be able to reach out to tens of thousands of people all over the WORLD

You can create something ONCE and have it generate money for years to come

You can scale your course LIMITLESSLY and watch your profits grow every time you do

It’s the cornerstone of IWT — we generate over 95% of our revenue through online courses.

This is revenue we generated just a few years ago — you can BET it’s much more now.

In the end, whichever one you choose will be good. BUT I would highly recommend doing both if you can.